This week the UK Covid inquiry briefly turned its attention to one of the most visible and consequential departures from the mainstream lockdown position in 2020: the Great Barrington Declaration.
But in doing so, the inquiry revealed an alarming lack of professionalism among senior scientists towards dissenting viewpoints and a reluctance to seriously consider these perspectives in its own assessment of the evidence.
The central premise of the GBD was that Covid policies were causing significant social harms and that a different approach, called “Focused Protection”, was required to balance viral control with population health and social wellbeing until we reached herd immunity.
Now we have learnt that the current UK Chief Scientific Adviser, Dame Angela McLean, called prominent lockdown critic Carl Heneghan, whose views were in line with the GBD, a “fuckwit” on a WhatsApp chat during a September 2020 Government meeting. Opposing lockdown was also considered “half-baked nonsense” by fellow Sage member John Edmunds, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, was among 32 senior UK academics who published an open letter against lockdown as the Government was debating the autumn 2020 lockdown. According to the Guardian, writing at the time, this revealed that there was “a schism within the scientific community over how to tackle the second wave of coronavirus in the UK”.
But this week, in the questioning of Heneghan’s support of the Great Barrington Declaration (he did not, in fact, sign it), the inquiry revealed an alarming lack of appreciation for what the document intended to achieve.
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